Lightcast Companies is a highly curated collection of global companies. On November 20, 2026, this dataset will become the foundational organization layer across Lightcast products, connecting organization profiles, job postings, workforce insights, technographics, and other datasets into a unified, high-quality view of organizations across the commercial, government, education, and nonprofit sectors.
Overview
Key fields include company revenue, number of employees, industry codes, and links to the ultimate parent company.
The full data dictionary is available here.
How to Access
Subscribe to the Lightcast Companies Data Share.
Subscribe to the new Company API endpoint.
Lightcast Companies will power job postings and profiles under the hood across all products.
What Changes should I expect?
Lightcast Companies becomes the foundational organization layer across Lightcast products. This is a major, ongoing investment.
New data is processed into Lightcast Companies every four weeks with stringent quality assurance checks for any changes to our top-tier companies as well as a dedicated focus on Fortune 1000, the most active job posters, and global public companies.
This is a major, ongoing investment. Customers should expect ongoing improvements to data coverage, and documentation as we refine and expand the offering.
To help customers navigate this change Lightcast will be:
Keeping our current company naming conventions wherever possible.
Providing a crosswalk from old company IDs to the new Company ID system, to minimize the impact on workflows and integrations.
What’s new in Lightcast Companies?
Expanded global company coverage, above the current coverage in the Company Taxonomy
Additional firmographic fields and metadata
Improved normalization and enrichment processes
Improved address standards and geocoding
Verified public company tickers and exchanges
Ways to track update cadence
Parent-child relationships, or hierarchies
Additional ways to segment companies
Key Benefits
Broader visibility into companies and organizational structures
Improved matching and enrichment capabilities
More detailed segmentation and analytics opportunities
Increased transparency into company data attributes
Support for future extensibility and integrations.
What is a Lightcast Company?
Our focus is on organizations that employ people. In practice this means:
Subsidiaries and branches have their own company ID, whether or not they currently have job postings or profiles.
Some major brands have their own company ID, linked to the parent company they belong to. Brands inherit their parent’s details, such as address and industry.
Dormant and inactive companies are not removed from the dataset.
Shell companies are not readily included.
Joint ventures are treated as companies in their own right.
How Company Hierarchies Work
Our hierarchies show how employers operate in the labor market. They are not a complete legal ownership tree, and a parent link does not mean we have confirmed the exact level of financial ownership.
Roles
Each company has a role that describes its place in the hierarchy:
Role | What it means |
Headquarters | The main operating company of a group. Other companies roll up to it. This is not necessarily a physical head office address. |
Subsidiary | A company with its own parent that is also a parent to other companies. |
Branch | A company or location with a parent that has no companies beneath it. |
Standalone | A company with no parent and no companies beneath it, or one where we have not yet identified a parent. |
Holding | A top-level legal entity whose main purpose is to own or invest in other companies, with little operating activity of its own. |
Parent fields
ultimate_parent_id, name, and country: the highest operating company in the group. A holding company is never the ultimate parent.
immediate_parent_id, name, and country: the company directly above this one in the hierarchy.
holding_id: the holding company that owns the group, where we know it. For example, a company owned by a private equity firm has that firm in holding_id, but the firm is not shown as its ultimate parent.
If a company does not roll up to another company, the parent fields repeat its own details.
How do we Classify Companies and Industries?
Matching company names in postings and profiles
We use the same company classifier for job postings and profiles, so both datasets share the same company IDs and names.
We take the raw employer name and normalize it, removing information that does not help identify the company, such as “LLC” or “Inc.”
We match the normalized name to the best fit among the known names for each company in Lightcast Companies.
Postings and profiles that name a subsidiary or branch are generally classified to the parent company, especially where the name includes the parent’s name. For example, “Walmart Canada” is classified as Walmart.
Industry codes
Each company has one industry code, based on the industry it works in most.
We code to 6-digit NAICS where possible and fall back to 2-digit if we can’t. We also provide 3-digit and 2-digit NAICS.
Our team assigns codes by reviewing each company’s website, completes research with the help of AI tools, as well as from trusted sources.
US and Canadian companies use US NAICS. UK, Australian, New Zealand and Singapore companies use their local version of SIC.
In Job postings and profiles:
A posting or profile takes the industry code of the company it’s classified to.
If a subsidiary or branch is classified to its parent, it takes the parent’s industry code. For example, “Walmart Canada” is classified to Walmart and uses Walmart’s NAICS code.
Staffing companies
Staffing companies are flagged, these can be a true staffing or recruitment companies or job boards or brands run by staffing companies. This allows customers to filter results based on what they would like to see.
Moving to Lightcast Companies on November 20, 2026
On November 20, 2026, Lightcast Companies becomes the default company database across Job Postings and Profiles.
What to expect
Job postings: expect little change in how companies are classified.
Profiles: expect a difference of 1% to 5% in the number of profiles associated with a company. This is in line with the updated classification and reflects more accurate coding.
Industries in the US and Canada: expect significant movement in 2-digit NAICS classification. More companies are now classified with an industry, as well as Lightcast’s continued investment in the accuracy of industry coding, with over 10,000 top companies hand verified.
Industries in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore: expect significant movement in SIC coding, because more companies are now classified with an industry.
For the list of affected products, the temporary fallback fields, and the action we recommend, see Lightcast Companies : API & Data Shares Update
For further information, please contact [email protected].
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